Slightly Misplaced Comic Book Characters Case File #432: Nebula

So, for the past few weeks, this space has been dedicated to showing how much the MCU’s version of the Guardians of the Galaxy differs from their comic book counterparts.  Rocket started off somewhat cute and cuddly.  Groot was a world-conquering monarch of a race of tree aliens.  Mantis was a human martial artist.  And quite frankly, I don’t blame James Gunn one bit for all these changes.  These characters all seem to have longer and more complex backstories than, say, the best known Avengers, that trying to condense the core of the character down to something that can be slotted into a two hour movie is probably not a terrible idea.

To that end, let’s talk about perhaps the unlikeliest of cinematic Guardians, Nebula.  She’s just a villain.

Nebula in the MCU, as played by actress Karen Gillen, is a blue, bald, cyborg that is among the various killers adopted by Thanos over the years during his mission to wipe out half of all life in order to restore balance to the universe.  This version of Nebula was horribly tortured every time she was bested by her adopted sister Gamora by Thanos, who would remove various parts of Nebula’s body and replace them with advanced cybernetics.  She would eventually settle things with Gamora and join the Guardians as a gruff, often cynical and grouchy member who would help the Guardians but rarely seemed all that happy about it.

About the only thing in that description that matches the comic book Nebula in her first appearance is she’s blue.

First appearing in The Avengers #257 by Roger Stern and John Buscema.  She was a space pirate who claimed one of Thanos’s old ships as her own, claiming to be his granddaughter.  As far as anyone knows, she isn’t in any way related to Thanos, but that’s neither here nor there.  A brilliant tactician and assassin, Nebula was basically a space pirate, one with a loyal crew who would mess with other heroes.  She didn’t really start off with superpowers or anything, but she did have a habit of collecting various weapons and artifacts.  One such weapon was known as the Infinity Union, a device that combined the power of three different gadgets to allow her to harness all manner of ambient energy to use in various attacks until the Avenger Sersi essentially took it apart at a molecular level.  Nebula was also responsible for a massacre committed against Herald of Galactus Firelord’s people.

Now, there was a point where Nebula was changed into a cyborg, but that whole “granddaughter of Thanos” thing was mostly treated as an affectation.  Given that Thanos didn’t seem to actually have an interest in having children (given his whole thing was the personification of Death), why would he have children, let alone grandchildren?  More recent stories (not written by Thanos creator Jim Starlin) have featured the idea that Thanos might have fathered children, but many times he will sooner or later come back to wipe the lot of them out because, you know, his whole thing is Death.  How could someone like Nebula get away with claiming Thanos as a relative?

Short answer:  she couldn’t.  Thanos would personally torture her in the Infinity Gauntlet story by changing her into a being that was smack dab between life and death, a shambling but still living corpse that wasn’t allowed to die, but that would eventually get the Gauntlet for herself when Thanos, as he always does, oversteps and sets himself up for the loss.

Thanos might be the original Bad Grandpa.

So, did Nebula reform after all this and eventually join the Guardians of the Galaxy?  As near as I can make out, no.  She’s mostly a character who pops up in cosmic storylines, looking for various powerful cosmic weapons she can use to commit whatever atrocities amuse her at the moment.  She has had brief periods where she was part of a bounty hunter team with Gamora, and at one point joined a “Dark Guardians” team to try to find Thanos before he resurrected himself while hiding in the mind of one of his enemies.  But really, Nebula is not all that heroic outside the MCU.

But I tend to find actress Karen Gillen charming in whatever I see her in, so maybe it isn’t that shocking that she became one of the good guys in the MCU.

Just don’t ask me where Gillen puts all that long red hair she has when she’s in that make-up.